Unlike many choreographers today, who require their dancers to contribute movement, Rushing says he’s very old school. He takes all the responsibility for generating the material.

He’s not shy about accepting challenges. When New Jersey Ballet’s assistant artistic director, Paul McRae, called with an invitation, Rushing says he was taken aback. He had never worked with a classical company before.

The Stillwater School of Performing Arts will celebrate Tallchief’s life and body of work, as the production takes the audience through some of Tallchief’s defining moments, from the Ballet Russes, to the New York City Ballet, and back to Oklahoma.

“It’s an appreciation of Maria Tallchief, but on a whole different level. It’s an appreciation for the fact that Oklahoma is not contained in and of itself and that we are related to the entire world of dance as a map and as a chronological history of what has happened in dance and specifically ballet for the last 60, 70 years.”

It goes against the grain to say that Ratmansky’s choreography, though musical, is not revolutionary. Balanchine’s influence rises again in the final movement, and it’s possible if the execution had been less ragged, maybe the work would appear stronger.

But when 20-year-old (and older) works by Maurice Bejart, William Forsythe, Jirí Kylián and John Neumeier look more modern than a 21st-century work, it gives pause. While different is not always better, when someone is snoring in the 10th row, the envelope is not being pushed enough.

“Techniques in Chinese classical dance include high-flying dives, flips, leaps, and tumbles. A predominant characteristic of the dance is its extremely demanding aerial techniques. The techniques can display different characters, such as elegant ladies of the Manchu Court, passionate and welcoming Mongolian women, and gentle girls of the Han ethnicity. These characters are then portrayed by the performance of individual dancers, with music, costumes, and gestures.”

So what has the reaction been to drag ballet in Red States and smaller markets? Over the years, The Trocks have developed a hide.

“We’ve been in 600 cities worldwide, in all lots of tiny towns in Montana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Siberia, villages in Italy, Spain, France,” Dobrin says. “Early on, sometimes we were not received so well by the local population. Once in Mexico City, someone said we were responsible for Mount St. Helens blowing up. But our audiences have always been very friendly, and we’ve been popular.”

A New Jersey native, Ms. Diana began her professional career as a member of the Corps de Ballet at San Francisco Ballet in 1993 and rose through their ranks to a promotion to Principal Dancer in 2000. She joined Pennsylvania Ballet as a Principal Dancer in September 2004 and has danced countless roles in both the classical and contemporary repertoire, including principal roles in Giselle, Romeo & Juliet, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Afternoon of a Faun, and Serenade. She dances the principal role in George Balanchine’s Diamonds from Jewels in the upcoming nationwide PBS broadcast Pennsylvania Ballet at 50, airing Friday, May 2. Ms. Diana holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and writes for various dance publications. She is married to Pennsylvania Ballet Principal Dancer Zachary Hench, and they have two children.

“What’s incredible about breaking a 50-year record this year is our dancers did it with sets and costumes that were up to 25 years old,” Jewell said, adding Devon will be the production’s presenting sponsor for the next 10 years. “Almost every ballet company in the country performs ‘The Nutcracker,’ and in many ways, the quality of your ‘Nutcracker’ is the perception of the quality of your company.”

What can the audience expect from you in terms of explanation and demonstration?

LJ: Astaire worked in a popular medium, but he was creating dance on the highest level. I’m going to be walking the audience through both of these numbers, using the dancers and musicians to demonstrate along the way, showing the audience instances of Astaire’s genius in dance making, including how he advanced the plot through his dances yet maintained a poetic and formal beauty that allows them to stand alone as works of art. I’ll definitely be giving some background on Astaire, which is fascinating. The result of his screen test at RKO was allegedly “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Also dances.” As for demonstrations, I’m not sure yet, but I always end up needing to use the audience to demonstrate one thing or another!

Ratmansky has openly spoken of his admiration for Shostakovich -- both the man and his music. The remarkable part of this deeply thought out work is Ratmansky's telling of the story -- and there is a story, though a fractured one -- in the composer's own language. He chose three of Shostakovich's scores and structured them along classical symphonic lines, with an opening, expository movement followed by a slow, adagio section and a lively scherzo finale. The choreography rises so astutely from the music that it often amplifies the scores to the point where it makes us see the music quite apart from whatever else we are looking at. He couldn't have done it without SFB's brilliant corps, often deployed in multiple, simultaneous passages that create the turbulent subtext in front of which Ratmansky put his soloists.

A preview of Houston Ballet's "Marie Antoinette" by Victor Swoboda in The Montreal Gazette.

“What fascinated me was just how much of a misconception I had about her,” Welch said in a recent telephone interview from Houston. “It felt very current in that today so much of what we know about people is how the media choose to portray them. It was interesting to me that all these things about Marie Antoinette like ‘Let them eat cake’ and the way she was so frivolous and thoughtless was all just rumour and gossip. The reality was something quite different.”